Did Nevada have no legal brothels before 1971?

The Mustang Ranch owned by Joe Conforte became the first legal brothel in Nevada in 1971.

The background

Lance Gilman has his fingers in lots of pies. His business empire includes the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, which recently landed an Apple data center, master planned communities in Nevada and California, and a Harley-Davidson dealership.

Gilman also owns the Mustang Ranch brothel just east of Reno. And he was recently elected Storey County commissioner.

He is the first brothel owner elected to public office in Nevada’s history.

A story about this feat appeared last month in the Reno Gazette-Journal. It was written by Martin Griffith of the Associated Press, and it included a passage that caused a reader to call Fact Checker:

“Mustang Ranch became the state’s first legal brothel — and most infamous — under former owner Joe Conforte.” Conforte opened the Mustang in 1971.

Clark Hesterlee of Sparks grew up in Lovelock and Winnemucca. He said, “I know Winnemucca has had legal brothels from the 1940s, and Lovelock had two brothels before the DA put in a bill to get them outlawed. … Legal brothels were here before Joe Conforte ever left Oakland.”

Hesterlee certainly seems right, given that there had been laws regulating brothels for decades, such as that they couldn’t be within 400 feet of a main road, school or church.

The go-to person on this topic is Nevada historian Guy Rocha, who has studied extensively the history of Nevada’s brothels and their legality.

So it makes sense to think they were legal before Conforte because of brothel zoning laws and fee requirements, doesn’t it?

“Why are you looking for it to make sense?” Rocha said. “If anybody thinks the law is always clear and understandable, you’re living in a fantasy world.”

He said brothels operated in a gray area: “The word used for years was ‘tolerated.’ When people look at the past and see that brothels operated openly, they think they were operating legally. They were zoned, but (communities) didn’t say they were legal. They said, ‘If you do this, do it over there.’ They didn’t say, ‘If you do this, it’s legal so do it over there.’”

Reno was big for brothels. It confined them to the east end of town along the Truckee River, including a once-nationally-famous area called the Stockade.

A madam named Mae Cunningham opened a brothel called The Cottage in 1948 along Reno’s East Commercial Row — actually it was reopened after closing during World War II — but it was ordered shut down by county commissioners.

Cunningham, not unreasonably, thought that if you zone me and make me pay fees then it’s unfair to shut me down if I’m not violating any law.

The case went to the state Supreme Court. A landmark ruling came down in 1949 in “Mae Cunningham v. Washoe County” saying basically tough luck, even though you’re zoned to not be located in certain places that does “not by implication legalize such houses in other areas.”

In other words, local officials could deem any brothel a public nuisance and have them shut down even though they haven’t broken any laws.

At the same time in 1949, the Legislature voted to legalize brothels but Gov. Vail Pittman vetoed it, declaring Nevada’s image would be damaged by “sensational and sordid publicity.” Thus, brothel status continued to be in a gray area despite legislative efforts.

So Conforte had a novel way of dealing with this. He created the Triangle Ranch out of mobile trailers in the Wadsworth area where Storey, Lyon and Washoe counties meet.

“If the heat got too much in a given county, they would move over the county line,” Rocha said.

If you have a legal business as proven by your business license — which brothels did not receive — and you’re shut down, you can go to court to get relief. But because brothels were merely tolerated and not legal, they had no recourse to such actions.

Or almost none.

Conforte convinced the Storey County Commission — to which Gilman just got elected — to legalize the Mustang brothel effective Jan. 1, 1971.

It was the first legal brothel in Nevada. In all, 10 of 17 counties now legalize brothels. Some require brothels to be away from populated areas (Storey, Nye, Esmeralda) while others require them to be within populated areas (Elko, Humboldt, Pershing and White Pine).

If the reader will allow an indulgence, which seems only right in an article on brothels, Fact Checker would like to relate one more anecdote in Nevada’s legal-brothel history.

Beverly Harrell leased land from the Bureau of Land Management for $100 a month to locate her brothel in an isolated and empty corner of Esmeralda County. National political writer Jack Anderson wrote a column saying this meant the Secretary of the Interior, Rogers Morton, was landlord of a brothel.

Morton couldn’t have this so he ordered her evicted. The federal government’s lawyers charged her with being a public nuisance, which she — also, not unreasonably — said was impossible given that the area’s only residents lived in the brothel.

But Morton had her objections stomped. In response, Rocha said, Harrell moved her brothel 2,000 feet onto private land, where it became legal again.

Harrell ran for state Assembly, winning the Democratic primary in 1974 but losing the general election. She was the first brothel owner to try for public office in Nevada; Gilman was the second brothel owner to run for public office in Nevada and the first to win.

Only time will tell if it means Nevadans are getting more accepting of legal prostitution.

The verdict

Although many brothels operated openly and were regulated by local governments in Nevada before 1971, they were tolerated but not explicitly legalized by any government body.

Better check out Roxie's in Las Vegas during the 50s, located near 5 point on the Boulder Highway. Infamous!

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Fact Checker columns by Mark Robison are rated on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being absolutely true with no gray area, 5 being down the middle with good points by both sides, 1 being false with no gray area and 0 being intentionally, maliciously or foolishly false.

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